• Timestamped Youtube Link
• Graphics : I very much like the pixel art, although some of it I do recognize from asset packs.
• Music / Sfx: Sound effects are fine. The lack of music aside from menu music is a bit disappointing.
• GUI : There's either a bunch of unfinished things here, or lack of information. There's an entire hero tab with gear slots that seem to do entirely nothing , accompanied by what I assume is a spellbook and another button of uncertain purpose that all equally do nothing as well as stats that are seemingly just decoration.  The stats on the various units you can hire are also left up to guesswork , a 'hover over' tooltip or a main menu 'glossary' would help with these. The main menu should probably have a logo with the name of the game on it.
• Gameplay : It's HOMM , it does the combat parts just fine with no complaints, but the lack of options or influence of the options (re-roll the shop for cash, buy hero equipment at the cost of not hiring as many units) and the fact that the aforementioned lack of options of units being hired means that you can have an entirely one-sided fight (especially if you get no ranged units but the opposing side entirely invested in them) means that the current fun and re-playability is rather limited by RNG and can be rather unfair.

I like what's here but it sincerely needs some work and refinement. I saw that the game had recently gotten it's maps overhauled and they new ones certainly look much better , hopefully some of the critiques I've listed will get some TLC as well.

Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 8! My name's Hythrain, a co-host and one of the streamers for this event! This feedback is being written live as I stream your game! If you're interested in seeing my live reaction, let me know and I can send you a link to the VOD once it's posted to YouTube!

So my normal approach for any game in these events is simple: I get the game, make sure it's not a virus, then play it with as little information on how to play as possible. This way, I can judge how intuitively someone can figure out the game. Only if it's obvious that I need to read more will I do so. I note this so you can get a sense where some of these feedback comes from. In addition, I want to note that feedback and rating are different; don't use this feedback to gauge what I'll rate, nor should you view my rating as entirely indicative of my feedback.

So this game is honestly just too difficult at this point. Most of my attempts couldn't even see me get past the first round, though admittedly this is because I would also restart a lot if I felt like I just had no chance to win. While I generally did figure out the systems in play (you deal damage based on hearts, and dealing enough hearts to an enemy is 1 HP of damage. Your damage is also dependent on your HP), I never felt like I understood how they worked. To explain what I mean, I was trying to figure out the stats. I had assumed one stat was in regards to damage, so if that number was higher than I didn't need as much HP to deal lots of damage. However, I then had a match up with an enemy that had a much lower attack value but more HP, and it did far more damage than I would've expected it to. Then there's the stat that I assumed was for range, which on most units was 1. I assumed this meant they could attack one block away. However, the Hunter (who can attack anywhere on the field and would need a 12 to go from one end of the field to the other) was only 3. 

One of the biggest difficulties of this game is that it does nothing to teach the player how anything works. None of the numbers make sense upfront. You have to infer everything, and even then it can be difficult to know if you're accurate. For example, I don't have any idea how the Defense stat interacts, I don't know what the stat that showed a range of numbers even does, and I don't know what the last stat does. Meanwhile, I feel confident that I need this knowledge to be able to play the game. As the developer, you likely know what all these numbers mean. Players don't have your innate knowledge, though, and thus need something to teach them.

On top of this, it feels like the scaling for the strength of the computer just gets insane. The furthest I got was to match 4, where I was pitted against two higher quality units (one with a sword, one with a spear), a hunter with a lot more HP than mine had, and a fourth unit. Meanwhile, I only had one higher quality unit, a hunter that as going to be wiped out very quickly, and two far weaker units that stood no chance. In another run, I was against a peasant with an insane 36 HP that was able to hit as hard, if not harder, than my strongest unit; even though my unit has a 5 in its attack and the peasant is only a 2. That is how much the massive HP scaled it.

Even from the first level, I find myself at a disadvantage. I can get a hunter with the highest HP available to me, but if I'm facing a hunter in the first round then it's most likely going to have more HP than my hunter. It got to a point where I just refused to do the first round if I fought a hunter, because I needed the ability to get some ranged damage for free to have a chance to get into the second round.

The whole aspect of damage being influenced by your HP also results in more equal fights taking far too long. A starting round where my hunter was about the same as the enemy hunter saw us slowly whittle away at each other while the melee units did their own thing. In the end I think it was over 10 rounds before one of the hunters finally died. It becomes a slogfest to deal with.

On top of this, I found a few bugs.

1. If you go to the menu on the top right so you can quit a match right as a round transition is about to start, the round transition will stop the menu animation entirely. The player then needs to hit the button again.

2. If you hit Play when not in full screen mode and then change it to full screen once on the screen to build your party, the menu will be shifted to one side and have part of it cut off - including the button to start the match.

3. While the game's system is clearly designed where you can perform other actions like a shield or attack so long as you don't use your full movement, the hunter doesn't have this. If you move one tile, it can't attack. This wouldn't be so bad if the hunter had enough movement to keep most threats at bay when it needs to run, but it has the lowest movement in the game. Only enemies that have that same movement will be kept away, and even then they can gain ground by moving the right way. So in my mind, this is a bug because the hunter should be able to attack.

Those are the main things I noticed. Hope this helps you out! :)

I gave this a try. The pixel art looks great, and it appears like its going to be a neat async auto battler, but I definitely had some issues.
Like others mentioned I don't know how to play and its not behaving exactly how other turned based games do so it was hard to pick up. 
I didn't really feel like I had enough interesting decisions when buying units as compared to other games in this genre like super auto pets. My first shop phase, I didn't think I could make any decisions. 

The main thing that intrigues me is its not an auto battler, and I don't know if I ever seen that before? I'm not sure how I feel about it, the idea that this ghost army is just AI driven, but my army isn't seems so odd, but maybe that's fine? I wonder if some of the problems would be solved if you just let it be an auto battler, and maybe it would be more satisfying and streamlined to just watch your army do its thing on its own? 
I think the visual appeal is on the right track, but I'd like to see the the core loop more fleshed out and explained. 

This is a cool game with cool graphics and sound and a promising foundation, but the winning strategy here isn't very obvious to me.  I did manage to complete the demo with one life left, but I lost my first three battles; the second I lost without killing a single unit, because I was completely overpowered by the enemy's ranged fighters.

I am familiar with HoMM/KB-style combat, but I am not an expert at it - so, while I understood most of the gameplay without a tutorial (except for the guard option, which I never quite figured out), there may be specific skills and strategies expected here that I am not aware of.  The problems I had were:

• As far as I can tell, the reward for each battle depends on how many units you kill, so the more outmatched you are, the more outmatched you'll be in the remaining rounds.
• In every round, the enemy army seems to be consistently stronger than the player's, always including heavy ranged firepower that can quickly cut down your units, and they tend to target your ranged units first.
• Most units just don't pull their weight, even the epic ones.  You of course need to stack as many units as possible to make them more effective, but every combat is guaranteed to inflict heavy casualties.  You get refunded for these casualties (note: this doesn't work if you retreat), but because unit supply is still limited and which units are available is random, this doesn't really help with building up an effective force.  Buying a dozen each of 3-4 mediocre units every round to replace the ones I lost just means I had to continue struggling with a pitiful army of mostly cannon fodder.  I felt like it didn't matter what I spent my gold on, because any given stack felt just as useless as another.
• What I would have done is try to soften up enemy melee units at ranged before chopping them down with my own melee units to try to minimize the damage I take, but since I lose a lot of ranged units in every combat, I never build up enough of them for this strategy to work very well.  Even arbalesters often can't deal enough damage to kill even one figure in any of the enemy stacks.  Whether I focus on killing ranged or melee units first, the result is the same, which is that I can't match the damage output from the stronger enemy army.

So, how did I manage to win?  I just had to buy as many archmages as I could and let them carry every round.  These are not only the strongest unit by an absolutely gigantic margin, but were essentially my only effective fighters at all.  Of course, since the enemy had just as many archmages as me, every round was basically just me trying to burn down the enemy archmages before they killed all of mine, with the rest of my units being mostly just a distraction until the archmages could kill everything.

I did a little better on a second attempt because I managed to hold onto some early units a bit longer, but still ended up in the same predicament.  I don't know - a HoMM expert might find this easy, but I don't really know where I'm going wrong.

Other than all of the above gripes about the difficulty, I do like the game.  My only other complaints are that I would like an option to speed up combat, as well as a downloadable version of the game.

This is a game which appears to have great depth, yet refuses to explain any of it to the player. The controls are intuitive and pretty easy to figure out, but the strategy is not. The sword and shield icons seem self explanatory, but what about that explosion symbol? Is that supposed to be magic? And what about that target symbol, is that accuracy or range?

The health system is bizarre. There appears to be multiple health bars on characters, and they can deal damage in hearts and skulls. Why do my weak characters take four skulls of damage from an attack, but my strong characters take twenty skulls...from the same exact attack by the same exact enemy? Everything feels arbitrary, like the game just decides whether it feels like winning or losing that round.

I can tell you've put a ton of love and effort into this, so I'll tell you what: let me know when you have the core mechanics explained (either as a tutorial in game or as a description in the game's webpage), and I'll come back and give it another play. I just don't feel like I can give good feedback for a game that's currently so cryptic and explains nothing to the player.

Side note: I love the pixel art for the backgrounds! The world feels so crisp and vibrant. Reminds me of the best RPGs from the SNES era.

As a forewarning, the feedback I have is quite harsh. I try not to give overly rough critique like this, but because I can see how much effort went into certain aspects of the game I would feel inauthentic if I didn't give my honest feedback regarding the gameplay portions of this game, and I wouldn't be doing you any favors ignoring the deep problems the gameplay currently suffers from. I'm not sure how close the game is to the intended final product, so I can only hope there is time to address some of this.

- The lack of any tutorial leaves me very confused about certain aspects. For example it seems like you are supposed to be able to purchase units at different quantities and not necessarily just at the maximum amount you can purchase, but if there is a way to do this I never figured it out. Similarly, the turn order is never explained and randomly enemies will take additional turns (or the inverse). Another unexplained mechanic is the... defense number? At least that's my best guess at what it is, except I never could figure it out. For clarification I'm talking about the number that is next to the health of the unit.

- From what little I've seen, the game has a grid but it seems practically pointless. Ranged units appear to be able to strike from literally any range, and melee units just rush towards each other and exchange blows. Sadly there doesn't really seem to be any strategy behind positioning, which I assumed would be important. It's also very strange to me that the ranged units cannot both move and attack at the same time... meaning that there's almost never any reason ever to move them.

- It seems to me that the player has almost no influence over who will win in fights. For instance take a melee unit fighting another melee unit- the only advantage to striking first is that during the entire fight you will get a singular extra attack in. In fights that take several hits before one unit dies, this advantage is almost entirely negated and effectively just comes down to who has higher DPS (and/or luck). If there is more strategy here, it's sadly never shown in what I played. As a consequence of this, if I understand at last the idea behind the defense ability, the player will consistently be actively punished for initiating attacks as opposed to just defending and letting the enemy attack. The only time that wouldn't be true is if the player knows they can kill the enemy in a single hit before the enemy can hit back.

- The animations are frustratingly slow, particularly because I feel like I'm barely even making strategic decisions, so I end up just constantly waiting for turns to play out. I wouldn't mind this nearly as much if there was some way to either speed up or skip this part of the game.

- I think that one of the biggest stumbles this game has- which makes many of the other problems worse- is that it is  both incredibly unfair/unbalanced (which I understand is difficult to get right, and for a playtest I wouldn't expect it to be in a final state) but worse, it seems to suffer from a really awful positive feedback loop. I played the game twice, and from what I can tell the enemy gets stronger from one fight to the next, regardless of whether you won or lost the previous fight. If you lose any single fight you are basically doomed entirely, because you're going to be fighting tougher enemies with way less than you even had against easier opponents.

cool game, thanks!

I really like the fight style! 

A few bits of feedback/wishes that I have:

1. A small tutorial would be nice, or even just a bit of text explaining the mechanics that the player can view (I tried to play it like HOMM3 but there are a few differences in mechanics that affect the gameplay, and I wish I knew about them without losing my units first)

2. Ambiance sounds are nice, but a bit of background battle music could make it so much better!

3. A small bug I found: when returning to the main menu and then starting the game again, it resets the victories, but not lives. 

It is nice game at this stage already, good luck with further development!